This invention relates visual depiction of audiencing and, more particularly, to visual depiction of audiences for viewing items in blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and other electronic repositories.
When people create an item on a blog or other similar electronic repository, they must decide on its audience. They must decide whether they should make the item available publicly to all, keep it internal to their company, group, team, or organization, or keep it private and viewable only by themselves.
Current tools support this option in one of two main ways: users can keep multiple blogs for different audiences or keep the items in a single location but with access control and audiencing set, to a greater or lesser extent, on the individual items. The main problem with the first approach is that people must maintain multiple repositories. They must decide when creating a new item where to place it and decide where to search when looking for an item they created in the past. If it makes sense for an item to be viewed by multiple audiences, they may be forced to duplicate efforts and place the item in several places/blogs. This problem of maintaining multiple similar blogs has caused people not to keep an internal company blog. The other approach, individual audiencing, can lead to potentially costly mistakes if people accidentally set audiencing incorrectly for items or lead to inefficiencies as they must switch among views to see the different items.